A 5 year old’s perspective on home exchanging…

Sam wanted to write a guest blog for me, so I sat down and asked him a few questions about home exchanging. Ever try to get a 5 year old to write an essay?

What’s the best part about home exchanging? The house and the car.

What place was your favorite? Holland, because of the chicken pen, because I could walk in it and get the chicken out.

Did you ever get the chicken out? Oh, it just walks out.

Did you ever touch the chicken? Yes!

Was it yucky? No, it wasn’t yucky, it was friendly. The chicken just ran out of its cage whenever I came up to it.

Do you remember some of the famous places we’ve visited?  Um, the car and plane museum.

How about in France? Well, the Eiffel Tower. Oh and that restaurant in the Eiffel Tower, it was in the leg.

Which place had the best weather? Holland and Sweden because they were warm.

Tell me about Norway. Norway was the best place because I could go into the igloo.

The igloo? The one in the circle, the roundabout. I know it doesn’t have a sign. I could fall down in the snow.

Was it always snowing in Norway? Yes, but not always.

What did you do in Norway when it wasn’t snowing? I just hanged around. You know about the net? It was the coolest because I could slide down.

Did you ever take a train? Yes!

Where did you go on the train? To the Olympics.

Do you mean Lillehammer? Uh huh. We went down the hill. In a snow mobile.

You mean a sled? Yes, I had brakes and I fell out a few times but it didn’t hurt me.

Were you scared? Yes.

Do you remember any of the pets you took care of? Jet, the cat, he was fun and playful.

Any others? Mira, the cat. I’m going to sing a song. Cat Scratch, catty cat, cat scratch, cat scratch. Boom!

So you can’t remember too much about Norway anymore? Well we builded a dam, I needed to get some huge rocks. I had an idea but we couldn’t use mine idea. We had to have a bungee cord to hook up on the logs, and then we’d hook it and we would sail out. We would put it on the other side of the dam and we would sail out to that area.

Wow! Where would we go? To the sea. We would have food.

Did anyone visit you during your home exchange? Yes, Roland. And Kerstin. Max the dog. Martin and Tina. Auntie and Allie and Uncle John, and Lisa.

Did anyone visit Sara? Grace.

Did anyone visit us in Holland? Grandma.

Do you like doing home exchanges? Yes.

What’s the best part? The Legos.

TTFN

Dear Middelburg,

I’m really overjoyed to have found you again. It seems so strange that many years ago we knew each other, even if only briefly, and I’m embarrassed to admit that just can’t remember. It’s not your fault, there was so much going on in my life back then and my head was really spinning. So let’s just say that I’m in a better place now, more introspective and, above all, more grounded. That’s why I have to go. I have to be sure of what I want, I can’t just be impetuous even though you want me to.  I just have to see what else it out there for me. So I’ll be back, I’m sure of it, I just don’t know when. I’m hopeful that you’ll still feel the same. Call me…

-XOXO

Stopping by castle on a windy morning…

 

Today we finally had a chance to visit the beautiful Westhove Castle, located between the villages of Oostkapelle and Domburg. The castle dates back to the early 13th century and was partially destroyed and rebuilt in 1572 and again in 1948. Now it’s a Stayokay youth hostel, still surrounded by a moat, with a small museum (one room) that didn’t look too interesting. Very cool. We didn’t go inside because the whole interior is dedicated to the youth hostel, but we could see in a few windows and it looked like, well, a castle. Jon has a thing about castles so we really wanted to visit at least one on our trip so he could cross it off his list. Plus, castles are cool…don’t you like the Lego one I made for Sam?

After the castle visit, we continued driving to the village of Domburg which was so adorable. The whole village itself spans about 1 square kilometer, and its few main streets are filled with small shops and restaurants with patio dining for excellent people-watching. In summers Domburg is full of tourists who come for the beautiful beach, the seaside golf course,  and the quaint resort town atmosphere.  The famous Dutch artist Piet Mondrian often spent his summers at the Domburg sea and both he and James Whistler (of Whistler’s Mother fame) both painted several works depicting the coast. 

So of course I am more than intrigued by this unusual town that has both a 13th century castle and a beach worthy of Whistler’s and Mondrian’s attention. I like it so much that we’re going back tomorrow morning. Maybe we’ll even paint a picture or two.

images: #1 is mine, the Whistler from artandpopularculture.com, the Mondrian from moma.org

Wednesday in the park with Sam…

 

Today was the first day in a while that the winding wasn’t blowing wildly, so Jon, Sam, and I were anxious to get back on our bikes and ride around. Sara and Mom were still lounging in bed when we were ready to leave, so they stayed home and did their own thing. Ahem. We rode to Middelburg (no, I’m not over my crush) and went back to a small park we’d biked through a while back. Jon and I immediately started goofing around on all the playground equipment and I think we had a better time than Sam did!

 

Young love is fickle…

So yes, it happened, and it happened rather quickly, too. Someone else turned my head. (Read the back story here). She is lovely and interesting, petite yet beautifully regal, and she leaves me wanting more. Her name is Serooskerke and although I’d passed her by a few times without much more than a glance, today she caught my eye and I can’t stop thinking about her. Alas, poor Middelburg…

Paarden me!

So you know by now that Gapinge is a rural town of about 300 people, a bunch of horses, tons of sheep, dozens of chickens, and, well, you get the idea. So as we were biking back from the grocery store in neighboring Serooskerke this afternoon, I was glad I had the camera so I could grab a couple shots of my favorite local sign: push button to cross. Everybody knows these buttons: push to change the traffic light in your favor so you can cross the street. Around here, though, it’s not so simple. There are so many cyclists that the button is set up on a post that you bike up to, not walk up to, with a little picture of a guy on a bike. That’s cute and different, but what really cracks me up is for the people neither on foot nor on bikes. Check this one out!

My mother brought the wind and cold

The weather has sucked ever since Mom got here. I’m not saying that it’s her fault entirely, but it sure is a big coincidence, don’t you think? We finally got Jon hooked up with a comfy bike that fit, got one for Mom for the 2 weeks, and had great plans for 3 generations of cycling through the Dutch countryside. Instead, we got in one short ride to Veere where we froze our asses off eating lunch en plein air and wishing for mittens. I don’t want to say that my mother cursed the weather so that she wouldn’t have to ride a bike, that would be rude, but let’s just say that the thought has crossed my mind a few hundred times. Just bring the warm weather back, Mom, you don’t have to ride the bike if you don’t want to…but we do!

And the winner is…

After many hours of deliberation, I have finally narrowed it down to the 2 winning entries in the HomeRoamers Caption This! contest that made me laugh the hardest. Since I can’t decide which one I prefer, I am declaring a tie.  The winning captions are:

• Does this fence make my ass look fat? (submitted by John Moretti)

and

• Dude: Ik ben een friggin paard. Net zoals u thuis. U hoeft niet mijn foto. Ga naar huis. (submitted by Steve S.)

You guys need to contact me with your addresses so I can send out your prizes!

 

Thanks to everyone who entered, and stay tuned for more contests and opportunities to win more prizes from Europe!

Back to 8th grade…

Today is a beautiful spring day. The sun is shining, the bird are chirping, and the neighborhood roosters woke me up at the lovely hour of 4:30 this morning. We decided to head to the beach and investigate.  On the way there we passed through a little tourist town with shops selling kites and beach gear, and I heard German and French being spoken by other bikers as we passed them by. I saw families with skim boards and young girls in bikini tops and short shorts, holding the hands of their eager boyfriends – but wait, it’s April. Am I missing something?

 

When we walked up the path to the beach, I was surprised by how wide and vast the beach actually was. It must have been 3 or 4 times as wide as the beaches in Florida, maybe even 5, and there were lots of wind tents set up and families playing in the sand. I started thinking about swimming. Would it be possible without a towel? Can I really strip down and swim in my underwear? Would I want to ride my bike 8 km back to the house in wet clothes? All of these people are at the beach today, it must be nice for a quick swim. I eagerly put my feet in the water only to discover, you guessed it, that it was so freezing cold there was no way in hell I would be swimming in it! I’d been thinking that we were in the same latitude as, I don’t know, maybe Maryland, and I could imagine people swimming in Ocean City on a beautiful spring day. Why not, right? So I still wasn’t sure why the water was so cold until I got home and looked up exactly what our current latitude is. 52 degrees North. Same as Maryland? No way. New York? Not even close. Get this – it’s Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Doh!  Sometimes I even embarrass myself.

Hoofd?

Last week we biked over to the adorable neighboring town of Veere to try to get a table at De Peperboom, the restaurant that our exchangers had recommended. It was full, and we weren’t really dressed for a more upscale place anyway, so we settled on one of the more touristy places in the central square that we’d been to before. We’d found out from the waiter the last time that Veere is a popular tourist destination for wealthy Americans on the smaller yachts – he said yachts, not me – as well as for day trippers from the Benelux region. There were a shitload of Americans walking around last time we were there, I’m not kidding, so we wanted to keep a lower profile and try to blend in. Until we saw the menu, that is. I hadn’t seen the dinner menu last time, and was vaguely horrified to scan down to the center of the page to see this: Hoofd. Oh, hell no. What are the animals with hooves, anyway? Do sheep have hooves? What about cows, and yes, definitely horses have hooves. Wait a minute, aren’t they called cloven?  I am already mostly vegetarian, never eating beef and occasionally some chicken or pork, so I was really not ready to be ordering from this section. Not possible. I settled on a warm goat cheese salad from the top of the page, and didn’t mention Hoofd to anyone. Can you imagine how relieved I was when I got home and looked up the word in the dictionary? It means mains, principals – you know, like Entrées. It was just the list of the main dishes, nothing to do with hooves or even animals. Go ahead, laugh at me…it is pretty funny.

Koninginnedag

Today is Koninginnedag, Queen’s Day. The Dutch celebrate the queen’s birthday with street parties and festivals, and wear the color orange to symbolize national and royal pride. We biked into Middelburg this morning to check out what was happening, and saw may people riding bikes decked out with orange streamers, and a few people were wearing crazy hats. It sort of reminded me of the way college kids dress on St. Patrick’s Day in the States, except orange. It was a fun day to have lunch outside and people watch…our local revelers (these cyclists) were not as festive as the Amsterdamers shown in the stock picture above.  But what really fascinated the kids – and I mean truly enthralled them – wasn’t a crazy costume or a dog wearing an orange crown. No, it was a urinal. Sure, it was a very odd looking portable urinal , one of many that had been set up in the central square for tonight’s festivities, but again, it’s just a urinal. Take my kids all over Europe and what do they point out to me over and over again? Yup, a big plastic urinal. Nice. Oh, and as it turns out, we’re relieved that we didn’t visit Amsterdam today as we’d originally debated. Queen Beatrix and her family were paying a customary visit to the neighboring city of Apeldoorn when and a car sped past her bus and crashed into a crowd of spectators.  Sadly,  2 people were killed and a dozen more injured. You can read more on CNN’s international page here. So sad.

 

Photo credits: #1 thehollandring.com, #2 my wonderful husband Jon, #3 onlyinholland.com

Check out lots of cool pictures from Holland here.

Could this be love?

I don’t remember any of the time I spent in Middelburg when I was in college. Granted that was a few years ago (ahem), but you’d think that once I spent some time in the city it would come back to me. Yet, not so much. I don’t know how I could forget such a charming place - it is one of my favorite cities in the world now. Yes, I know it’s a little early to be falling in love and I don’t want to jinx it by saying anything to soon, but I could definitely see myself in a long-term relationship with her. She’s friendly, attractive, and full of surprises…and interesting enough that I won’t get bored too quickly. You know how I do that.  I know that Jon likes her too, but he’s takes his time. He calls me a gun-jumper, and maybe I am, but I know what I like. So I’m going to take it slowly and keep an open mind, but this might be the real thing.  Keep your fingers crossed for me, and I’ll let you know if she calls.

PS: Click on the picture to enlarge it so you can see for yourself how alluring she is. Am I right???

Limb training?

Many of the houses here have a funky landscaping feature that I’ve never seen before. People are making huge trellises in front of their houses by training the limbs of a certain kind of tree to grow straight across at a 90° angle from the trunk. They start out with anywhere from 3 to 8 trees, trellis trees I call them now, and plant them about about 4 feet apart. These trees stand at least as tall as the roof line, but without any branches. Then they use wire to make an actual trellis to serve as a guide for the branches when they begin to grow. The branches grow across from one trunk to another, and the final result is a sort of crosshatch pattern to decorate the front of your house. Do you get it yet? Look, let me show you.  Here is what you start out with – click the pictures to enlarge them so you can really see what’s going on:

 

See how the branches have just begun to extend across to the next trunks? They are still quite thin and without much growth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The branches are thicker and have begun to bloom on this house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a more mature look – and this one even wraps around the house on the left. How cute!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think this is such a different and interesting way to landscape, but I’m not sure that it always works. I love the house in the 3rd picture above, but I’m not so sure about the others. What do you think?

de witte mosk

We’ve just arrived at our exchange house in Gapinge, Holland and it’s full of surprises. You already know from reading Jon’s blog that we saw gorgeous views of the tulip fields that I told you about from the airplane (click here if you need to catch up).  We were met at the airport by Piet and Lies, our exchangers, and they turned over their car to us and off we went. I had thought that we were going to be in the middle of nowhere, but it turns out that their house is in a little village, not out in the boondocks. It’s definitely rural compared to, say, Amsterdam, but just a quick drive into the much larger city of Middelburg. The most surprising thing about the house is the beautiful gardens that surround it everywhere – this is especially amazing to me since I have what my mother calls a black thumb. I can barely keep a house plant alive, there is no way I would ever be able to have gardens like these. There were a few surprises in the kitchen as well. Last night as I was cooking, I saw about 30 people go by on horseback, and maybe 50 people ride by on bikes. I’m not kidding! This is such a bike-friendly place that no wonder everyone rides, from the youngest babies on the front of their moms’ bikes to the littlest old ladies who surprise me with their agility. Take a look at the some more pictures of the house and the gardens…I’m going for a bike ride!

 

3 more days…

I just got a lovely note from our exchangers in the Netherlands. They are gracious enough to start our exchange a few days earlier that previously agreed upon so that we can go straight to their place after leaving our house in Norway. They sent us information about their home and after reading the specifics we are even more excited to get there and to see what it’s like in Gapinge. The cool part is that they are going to be blogging about their trip and will share their stories and photos with us – our Norwegian exchangers sent a few pictures but not many, and we’re curious! Anyway, we’re eager to learn what there is in Holland besides tulips and windmills. Stay tuned!

image: emmerspaperarts.com

Tiptoe through the window...

Next month my mother is coming to visit us in Holland, and she had asked me to take her to Keukenhof in Lisse, Netherlands to see the flowers. I am not really a garden person, nor a flower person, and especially not a drive-90-minutes-to-wander-around-for-two-hours-admiring-flowers person. I would much rather do somehing useful, like laundry or shave my legs. However, when I saw these arial pictures of the tulip farms in Holland, I completely changed my mind. How fantastic is this???

images: London Daily Mail

What's a dale and where can I find one?

I hate to say it, but the bike riding here is kicking my ass. There really aren't any flat stretches, so it's more of a squiggly line of torture through the burbs of Ålesund. Remember the sledding hill leading down into our cul-de-sac? Well that's nothing compared to the rest of the hills that are around the house, making biking pretty unpleasant about 50% of the time. No wonder the locals are in great shape; a quick trip of only a few miles is a full cardio workout. I'm looking forward to moving into flatter terrain as the weather improves. We'll be in the Netherlands in less than 3 weeks, just in time for the first bloom of tulips, warm weather, and easier bike rides.

Coming up next...or, Don't worry when your friend sleeps with the guy you like.

The Gapinge house!

It seems sort of, well, rude to sit in this beautiful house and look out on the mountains while planning for the next segment of our home exchange.  In just 5 short weeks we'll be leaving Ålesund for Gapinge, Netherlands for a 4 week swap with a kind retired couple.  I was lucky to find these folks after our original exchangers from Northumberland, England cancelled on us over the holidays. Apparently this type of behavior is not common, but we'd had a few false starts already and the idea of being homeless for 5 weeks between two home exchanges did not make me feel too festive.  I was really pissed at these people, especially because we had met them in person and thought we'd built a great rapport with them over dinner. We'd even bought a GPS system for our car because the husband was worried about driving in the US and we wanted to make it as easy as possible.  Whatever. I channeled my frustration into a wide search for a suitable exchange and was quite happy to find these Dutch exchangers who were looking for a trip to Florida. It works out much better than an exchange in England, where we weren't too excited to go in the first place because we already speak English (well, most of us). I knew it was meant to be when I realize that Gapinge is only a few kilometers outside of Middelburg, Netherlands where I'd spent a few days back in college.  Sure, it was about a man, but we were already on a trip to Europe and he was a handsome young professor. Don't judge. So I guess the moral of the story is that while my friend got the professor (and made sure I knew it), and although I had to wait 20 years for karmic balance, I was ultimately rewarded with a home exchange that came to my rescue. Karma is real!